When I was invited to speak here in the Amazon, I kind of freaked out. I looked up the other presenters–all these legendary leaders in the field who’ve dedicated their lives to ayahuasca, shamanism, brain science, enthnobotany, chemistry, or art–and I thought, what can I bring to this? I’m just the Teafaerie. I write a sassy Internet column for a psychedelic information site frequented by do-it-yourself experimentalists.

Ayahuasca is a sacred mystery, and I am deeply ignorant about it. I’ve taken it less than a dozen times. I’ve read a few books, a bunch of articles, and a lot of trip reports. I’ve poked around on the forums. But I still have way more questions about ayahuasca than answers. I know that it’s changed my life, maybe saved my life; it’s healed me, it’s helped me unknot some sick behavior patterns; it’s opened up my body and my mind, my heart and my soul. I know that it’s the real thing. It’s a living magic medicine.

And my people are very sick, you know? The whole planet is very sick. So I thought: here’s a chance for someone from my unique demographic to talk to some of the shamans of the Amazon and the Movers and the Shakers, to the people who work with this stuff, and to try to figure out how we can best relate to this mystery and to one another.

I don’t really represent anybody, but I identify with a large and growing segment of psychedelic culture. Born when the ’60s and even the ’70s were already history, we were brought up pretty much soaking in it. We have virtual lives, and yet our culture is archaic: it’s neo-tribal; hippies and ravers and Burners, oh my! Festival kids, the ecstatic dance culture, world-traveling spiritual seekers, and straight people who have had their lives touched by psychedelics. We don’t have very much tradition to draw on, so we’re often just kind of winging it. We’re foolish maybe (definitely, sometimes), but we’re courageous, too, and we’re coming on. We’re being called by this thing. I do believe that we’re being called.

And suddenly, we’re all finding out about ayahuasca. It’s like Facebook is accelerating it, or something. It’s not surprising that people are interested in it. What’s surprising is how long it took the news to reach critical mass. But now it seems like every party I go to, people are talking about ayahuasca. Everybody wants to try it, all the cool kids are doing it, and if you haven’t felt the wind shift here in Iquitos, then you soon will.

I don’t know the best way to proceed. I mean, do you want them to come here? Can the legitimate curanderos handle that kind of a caseload? Or is it going to exacerbate the problem by providing even more incentive for opportunists who want to put a bone through their nose and send their nephews down to the airport with business cards advertising them as shamans? These guys can make a hundred bucks a pop. It’s great for the economy; it’s terrible for the economy; it’s helping people; it’s… complicated. Right? So let’s go further in, and take ayahuasca in an indigenous setting. Because we know that’s totally legit. But the more tourists who tramp through a village, the more it gets exposed to guns, bibles, alcohol, STDs, you name it. And while nothing’s going to stop the march of progress, I don’t want to be part of the problem.

Another choice, if one has heard this call, may be to find a local shaman. Or one could check out established religions such as the Santo Daime and the UDV. Or one could concoct a batch of brew one’s self–countless businesses sell entheobotanicals these days, and there are a myriad of analog possibilities. Everything has DMT in it; there’s Acacia-huasca, and Mimosa-huasca, and Phalaris-huasca…

I’ve never tried any analogs, so I can’t really say much about them. I’ve heard mixed reviews. Maybe they’re really different, with different spirits and different properties. For the sake of argument, let’s just say that they’re not the same thing at all. I’m still willing to bet that the wisdom surrounding how to deal with them properly is largely going to be the same.

Talking about the plants isn’t enough. We also have to talk to them, and listen to what they have to say. And the last time I had a chance to talk directly to Mamma, during an ayahuasca ceremony in Canada a couple of months ago, I asked her what I should speak about when I was here tonight. And she showed me a vision of all the core lightworker Jedi master shamans of the Amazon making ayahuasca together, spending the day together stripping leaves and chopping up vine, sharing their songs and stories and dreams and techniques; and then at night they took the medicine that they had made together, and they sang a mighty song, and they cast a spell that would allow ayahuasca wisdom to metastasize and bloom. And I hope that really happens. I hope that you already do have some sort of a shamans’ circle that drinks and works together. I’m given to understand that it’s kind of a cut-throat business. Yet I can’t imagine any power in the world that could resist the focused intent of the badasses of the Amazon if you all joined forces.

Part of the vision seemed to be about transmitting knowledge to the new wave of psychedelic explorers. People are busting this out in their Manhattan apartments. It’s like when the intelligentsia lost control of LSD. Suddenly everybody is doing this, and we’re like babes in the woods. Many of us are totally clueless. The monolith from 2001 has landed in our collective backyard, and we’re out there scratching out heads going, “Hmm, what is it? What happens when I step inside of it?” We’re like the sorcerer’s apprentice, opening portals at random and yelling, “Here I am! I don’t know what I’m doing! Come share my nervous system, I’m wide open!”

We are in desperate need of training. We know set and setting. We have resources like Erowid for specifics like dosage and preparation techniques. But we don’t know the wisdom, and we don’t know the songs. We don’t know how to entice the spirits, or how to protect ourselves from those that we shouldn’t interact with. We don’t know how to tune it. We don’t really even know how to swim; we’re just thrashing around learning how to dog paddle. And we are learning; the plants themselves are excellent teachers. But we get it that there are many thousands of years’ worth of important knowledge that we just don’t have. We know that it’s dangerous to proceed without it, and we know that it’s not as effective to proceed without it. We really want to learn it. We want to drink with legitimate shamans from a cultural lineage who actually know what time it is.

Yet more and more, I hear people complaining when ayahuasca ceremonies are too traditional. Not here, of course. People come to Peru for the traditional thing. But where I live in California, I hear people talk about novel modalities beginning to evolve. For instance, I go to one annual ceremony, which is also a flow arts retreat, and we’re allowed to stand up and spin poi right there in the maloka. We sing Daime songs and Sufi songs and Hindu songs and Beatles songs. It’s awesome, it’s magic. Mamma likes it, I promise you. Everybody gets good healing, good insight, good flow… and I’m really enthusiastic about it, because I think that it demonstrates that there are a number of modes that will work. While it’s important to respect the original tradition, I think part of such a respect might be to refrain from doing a half-assed imitation of it. Cultures are colliding and new forms evolve at the intersections. That makes sense. So the next time you see a traditional shaman serving it up out of a Coke bottle, remember that everything is made of magic and everyone has their part to play.

The coming wave of psychedelically aware young people has an important part to play. They’re well connected. They’re good at disseminating information. If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be passed on. But in order to be understood by these guys, you’re going to have to learn to speak their language. You have to know their mythos, so that you can reach them where they live. A song that was written to be played on a Shipibo instrument might still be playable on an electric guitar, but it would naturally evolve a bit in the translation. Every generation has to reinterpret the ancient stories. We can’t discard them, but we’ve got to update them to reflect the world that we know.

In order to turn things around at this point, a lot of things have to go right really fast. We need all hands on deck. We need all lightworkers activated. This means you. We need everybody with any kind of real wisdom or real magic to be pumping it out it as efficiently as humanly possible. We can’t hold back. We can’t be afraid of getting it wrong. We can’t try to preserve tradition while the whole thing goes up in flames. Because you know what? The Amazon is over. There’s not going to be any healing in the Amazon, until there is healing in New York City, and in Los Angeles, and in Dubai. They need a hell of a lot of healing, and we don’t have much time. We need warriors for Gaia right now. We need a mystical order of real live superheroes.

And that’s what we want to be. It’s what we’ve been preparing for all of our lives. Nothing is accidental. Maybe one person in fifty, or one in a hundred, has the shamanic personality type, right? And we’ve all been mildly activated by exposure to mythic imagery. The Star Wars generation was raised to want to be mystics. The Matrix generation is rejecting the program. We know that it’s all an illusion and that this is our dreaming. The kids growing up on Avatar want to plug into the AI–the Amazonian Intelligence–and it’s there, you know; it’ all true, it’s all real. It’s as real as we ever could have wanted it to be. And we want it to be real. We want to take it seriously. We know that this is the end of the world. We know that a mass transformation has to occur, and if this mystery could be brought on board our lives in a way that fulfills our mythos, I think that we could be fully activated by it.

Ayahuasca is a jungle spirit, but she’s a space-faring spirit as well. She’s as futuristic as she is archaic. She knows everything. She’s not some kind of a country bumpkin that gets confused by them-there city folk. She talks to you in whatever terms you have in your head. If your background is in jungle mythology, she might give you a giant anaconda. But if your background is in science fiction, then she’ll give you Shai-Hulud, the sandworm from Dune. And maybe this is partially the same image, I don’t know. But I know that when I asked the plants what I should talk to you about here tonight, they said that I should talk about founding the Jedi Temple.

So how about it? I don’t really want to call it that. I’m not trying to make light of it, or trivialize it–quite the reverse. Though I do like the Jedi Academy word praxeum, which means a temple for both learning and practice.

I know there are already partial condensations of this–the so-called shamans’ schools. And there are retreat centers that kind of sound like what I’m talking about. But I mean something closer to a real university, housing a bunch of experienced shamans-in-residence, where you could go and live for however many semesters. Sure, you might drink a lot, you’d probably stay pretty immersed, but you’d also take classes, and different shamans would teach “Defense Against the Dark Arts” or “Icaros 101″. There would be botany classes, too: “Hands-on in the Jungle” and “Ecology of the Amazon”. There would be experts instructing students in brain science and chemistry and transpersonal psychology.

You could have a program for postulants to come and experience the medicine–just for an exploration, or for a reset, or for healing–and the full-time students could assist with that. The teachers could all do ceremony together, like I saw in my vision. They could take each other’s classes, too. If more scientists met the plants, and if more cuanderos had a background in modern psychology or chemistry or quantum physics or even popular culture, a lot of good would come out of it. Shamans are like our doctors and our ministers and we need you to know where we’re coming from and where we’re going, what kind of energies are available to us and what kind of demons we’re fighting. We need shamans to come to Burning Man and to New York City, because we don’t even know our own songs. The patterns are all mangled and we don’t know how to fix them. We need an icaro for the Internet; we need to lay song-lines through the virtual landscape and out beyond this world to the stars.

We need you to help us find the form of shamanism that’s right for people like us. I don’t even want to use the word shaman for the students. Shamanism is an ancient and venerable institution and I wouldn’t want to trivialize it by suggesting that any kind of program could churn out a new crop of shamans every year–that’s preposterous and insulting. Shamans are going to take on individual apprentices who will go live with them in a hut in the jungle for years and really get into it, and I don’t want to degrade that. But there are only so many legitimate apprentice spots open, you know? And we need to develop our collective potential as quickly as possible.

I want to make a new distinction between layperson and shaman–an adept, maybe. It’s sort of like the difference between a doctor and a nurse practitioner. I’d like to see something analogous to a pilot’s license or open water certification for SCUBA divers that says you’ve logged however many hours, know what all the little dials do, learned something about currents and sharks and what to do in an emergency, and you’ve memorized all of the little hand signals, like “anaconda”, “condor”, “elfin swarm”. Such a license would mean you’re okay to go, that you can voyage with someone of your rank or higher and probably do more good than harm. It doesn’t mean that you can teach people, but it means that you have a basic grounding in first principles, you have some experience, and you’re a good source of information. Yes, I do know that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. But a little bit of knowledge also might save your ass and your friends’ asses. An adept could be counted on to alert her community about contraindicated combinations, for instance. She could smooth the psychic waters with an ancient song, redirect imbalanced energies and generally feel into what’s happening. People with such basic skills contribute toward manifesting the future that we all want.

Besides being healing nodes in their communities, these students could be ambassadors for the Amazon. Maybe we could establish a tradition where all of the money taken in for ayahuasca sessions goes back to the Amazon; or, at least part of it does. It could improve the economy in the Amazon in a controlled way. And we could have this awesome center–maybe a bunch of them, with good libraries and cool art and big gardens and recording studios.

But it would mean evolving the tradition and doing things a different way than the way that they’ve always been done. Business as usual isn’t going to work in the city and it’s not going to work in the Amazon, either. These are extraordinary times, and they are forcing us all to adjust and evolve our practices in unprecedented ways. Taking ayahuasca the old way because that’s the way it’s always been done is like running DOS forever because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Evolving means working together, and dropping the whole “I’m the baddest shaman in the Amazon” bit. I was kind of surprised to hear about some of the infighting that goes on–in my naive hippie idealism, I assumed that all the shamans of the Amazon would be One.

The time is here, the die is cast, the game is up, the chips are down–this is the crucial moment for our species, and we’ve got to give it everything we’ve got. Ayahuasca just might be one of the catalysts that we need. It’s moving out in the world and making new friends. It’s making new covenants. We’ve got to negotiate a new partnership with it. Maybe it’s evolving, too. Terence McKenna said that the mushroom wanted to disperse into culture. It wanted to make contact with these strange new minds and to co-evolve with us. Maybe ayahuasca wants the same thing. I’m afraid it’s going to get it, whether it wants it or not. Kind of hard to imagine things not going its way, which is comforting…

We’ve got to talk to it. We’ve got to ask it what it wants. We’ve got to work with it. So the next time Mammahuasca picks up the phone, be a good ambassador. Tell her that a lot of strange people are coming, and ask her how we can channel this river. How can we find our way through this jungle? How can we fulfill our potential, both as individuals and as a species? How can we partner together to heal the world that we share?

I hold ayahuasca in the most sacred regard, and if at any time I have sounded disrespectful here, I humbly beg your pardon. It’s a deeper mystery than I can begin to fathom. The more I commune with ayahuasca, the less I think that I know about it. All I know is that I want us to win the human race, and it looks like it’s going to be pretty damn close. I want us to do everything that we can to stack the deck in our favor.

Maybe this is just what happens. Maybe this is how baby gods grow up, and we’re in puberty at the moment. You know how they say that we’re the children of God? But the child of a sheep grows up to be a sheep, right? And the child of a human being grows up to be a human being.

The future is trying to be born right now, and we need midwives on every corner. May the Force be with us all.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing to take only natural drugs, obviously. There’s nothing wrong with choosing not to take any drugs at all. I think that many people haven’t thoroughly thought their own reasoning through, though, relying instead on knee-jerk biases to guide their decision-making and to rationalize their actions.

Plants are awesome. Plants are great. Hooray for plants and all that they imply. Most of my favorite drugs are plants or relatively simple plant-based preparations. Potent and mysterious are the natural allies; rich, deep, subtle, and strong. Some of them appear to have enjoyed a long history of human use without ever having been definitively linked to serious problems like cancer or dementia, which I find mildly reassuring. Some of them seem to have personalities or at least unique content signatures, which fascinates the hell out of me. Many plants are relatively simple to grow, and it’s usually easier to identify a fake plant than it is to identify, say, a fake white powder insofar as knowing what you’re getting goes. Plants can contain numerous alkaloids and other chemicals that may play a supporting role in manifesting their specific effects, in addition to their so-called “active ingredients”, so it’s super hard to make a perfect analog. Thousands of years’ worth of lore has built up around techniques for making the best use of certain traditional medicines, whereas with synthetics you kind of have to wing it. Also, some people have a spiritual connection to or emotional affinity for plants. I know that I do. I eat them to stay alive for one thing, and you can’t get much more deeply connected than that. In some places, certain psychedelic plants are even legal.

Plants don’t necessarily make better drugs just by virtue of having sprung fully formed from the fertile womb of Mother Gaia, though. Take it from a girl who used to have a Datura plant growing right outside of her little hut in Thailand. Take it from someone who almost pisses her pants laughing every time she hears her friend Robin tell “The Nutmeg Story”. Belladonna, henbane, mandrake, and some of the sketchier mushrooms might get you high, but they’re notoriously hard to control and it’s easy to make yourself sick if you don’t know what you’re doing. Proper dosage can vary from plant to plant as well as from person to person, and once in a while a plant will surprise you. Some people don’t really get along all that well with the plants on a personal level, when it comes right down to it. Mescalito can be a tricksy bastard. Mushrooms have a funny sense of humor. Salvia is all coy with some people at first and then she comes on too strong once she has them in her clutches. Or whatever. Some plant psychedelics make me nauseous every time I take them. Cyanides come from plants. Nature has recklessly created a stunning variety of compounds over the course of millions of years of competitive evolution, and a tiny fraction of those compounds just happen to be compatible with the human organism to such a degree that reliable psychedelic effects can be produced in most of us without incurring a whole lot of risk. Whoo hoo! Yet a great many more plants turn out to be deadly, or sickening, or inert.

Synthetics, likewise, have their downsides. It’s hard to be sure how street drugs are being made, and the purity of the supply is often compromised to maximize profit. Some synthetic drugs are easily abused or addictive or deleterious to the system. And make no mistake, big pharma is just as guilty of pushing that kind of crap as the clowns who blow up trailer parks with their edgy science projects. Many of my least favorite drugs are synthetic, and the synthetic drugs that I like the most are so new that long-term impact studies have not been possible. Of course, the same thing could be said about cellular phones. Perhaps we’ll find out that we have a problem on our hands when all the little raver kids start getting Alzheimer’s disease in their 50s or something. There’s no reliable way to know yet. Secondary effects of some kinds of substance use, such as dancing all night and not eating right or getting enough sleep can also engender health problems. There are plenty of good reasons to be cautious about taking any drug.

What bothers me is when people actually think that drugs are “bad” on some level, and that plants constitute some kind of a loophole because they come pre-packaged by the pure matrix of being, rather than having been cooked up in the dark retorts of imperfect and unworthy humankind. This is the Frankenstein myth. We are fundamentally fallen beings and whatever we create will inherit our original sin. In Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley wrote about the dream that inspired one of the most important myths of the Industrial Age:

I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world.

Thou shalt not play God! Even today, I think that message still resonates. It’s easy to see why. We’ve already more or less botched the planet up, and we have no idea how to fix it. We fear that our output will be perverted by our flaws, or that we will prove too stupid for the task, or perhaps we’ll outsmart ourselves and mess things up even worse. We look around and see many of yesterday’s brilliant solutions become today’s poorly anticipated problems. We wonder if the presumptuous audacity of messing with the human genome, building hyper-intelligent machines and stealing fire from the heart of matter won’t inevitably be punished, if not by a jealous creator or a vengeful ecosystem, then by the blind justice of cause and effect. We all know the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice who played with forces beyond his ken and ended up in way over his head. We know good and well that mistakes will continue to be made at great human cost. It’s tragic. And it’s just how it goes. It’s how it’s always gone. Progress advances funeral by funeral. It sucks. It would suck worse to turn back now, though, when the stakes are so high and so many groundbreaking wins seem nearly within our grasp.

We can’t get out backward. We’ve got to go forward, and I know, it’s tough. Sometimes I just want to say to hell with all this malarkey and go back to the short, brutish unexamined life of our forebears. (Right up until I get a toothache or something, then I’m hightailing it back to the future.) I do understand a sort of poetic nostalgia for the “natural” or primal state. One might be tempted to regret the decision to leave the garden of pre-sentience in which we had only to rely upon our instincts. We might feel that we have made a devil’s bargain by sacrificing harmony with our womb environment in favor of intelligence. The problem with that logic is that we never really had a choice. Any being with a mind capable of making a conscious decision to outgrow its evolutionary niche can rest assured that it descends from a long line of apple lovers. That boulder was barreling towards the valley long before its momentum produced an observer capable of irrelevant conjecture about life up on the hill. By the time we were sophisticated enough to call the virtues of progress into question, the game had been on for a very long time indeed, and the exponential acceleration of technology was already inevitable.

We must bear in mind that our intelligence has also arisen from nature and is not apart from it. We don’t come into this world, we come out of it. We’re part of what it’s doing. Beehives and beaver dams are considered natural, so what does that make my apartment? Some kind of an abomination? The line that separates natural and synthetic artifacts can be blurry, and nowhere moreso than in the realm of psychoactive materials. Many lab drugs are essentially replicas of compounds that exist in nature, just built from the bottom up rather than extracted from a more chemically complex biological source. Does extraction make a compound officially un-natural? How about combination and concentration? How much is too much? I suspect that most people would think of coca leaves as natural, but that once they had been processed into cocaine they would lose their status as a sacred plant and become a dirty old drug. The same could be said of nature’s lovely poppies. Interestingly, I don’t imagine that most people would consider ayahuasca un-natural, even though it has to be processed, combined and cooked down in a series of complex steps that takes all day to complete. Why is that? Where on the spectrum does fermented grape juice lie? Tobacco leaves are natural but cigarettes are nasty. Sugar doesn’t seem like a plant at all. Salvia divinorum is mostly a cultogen. And do you think that the pot these kids are smoking today bears any resemblance in presentation and potency to strains that evolved in the wild?

We must claim the power of self-determination and the greater sense of both accountability and pride that comes with it. In more and more arenas it’s becoming painfully clear that our primary impulses are no longer sufficient or even entirely appropriate with respect to the tasks at hand. What served us in good stead in our ancestral jungles is often letting us down in the bedrooms and boardrooms of our modern surround. The past fifty thousand years have witnessed a fundamental shift in the course of evolution. The runaway success of epigenetic strategies like language acquisition have radically changed the nature of the survival game. It’s all about the software now, the exponential development of which far outpaces that of the poor, slow-changing hardware. Perhaps we will soon be possessed of the technology and temerity to take the genetic process to hand for good or for ill. For the nonce we are constrained to try to run these snappy competitive new programs on the same ancient operating systems we’ve been stuck with all along. We’re just not designed for this shit! But here we jolly well are, and we’ve got to do the best we can with what we’ve got. We’re all in it together now, you know. We are going to have to reinvent ourselves. We’re going to have to adapt. We can no longer behave in inappropriate ways and chock it up to “human nature”. Our meteoric rise to sentience and technological domination has left the ecosystem teetering on the brink of catastrophe, and a failure to act decisively would be a choice for which we would have to answer to future generations, if any. We’re going to have to use every tool at our disposal and a few that we haven’t even thought of yet, I imagine. The survival of the entire species, and all species, hinges on our successful synthesis of instinct and intentional design. No pressure or anything. That’s why I think this conversation is so important. If we fear and distrust our own handiwork, if deep down we feel that we can’t create something greater than ourselves, I think it’s going to make it a lot harder to act with the clear, sure, swift strokes that the current cusp seems to call for.

And if we can make it better, why not? It seems obvious to me that this is what’s supposed to happen, or anyway it’s the only aesthetically viable version of events that I can come up with. When the software is sophisticated enough, and it’s getting there, maybe it can somehow be used to get the hardware up to speed. In fact this is happening. Millions of people are prescribed medicines every day for both mental and physical illnesses. Some of the medicines are natural, but in the west the vast majority of them are children of the lab. Many are intended to treat life-threatening diseases, and some are designed to address quality-of-life issues, like impotence and anxiety. Do I think that drugs like Prozac and Ritalin are over-prescribed? For sure. Some people really benefit, though, and we’re only going to get better at making drugs that do what we want them to. Who’s to say what quality-of-life issues should or should not be addressed with pharmacological intervention? Leaving aside the possibility of improving upon the current vision of the healthy state, there is good and growing evidence that when conditions are right, otherwise intractable cases of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, chronic substance abuse, and end-of-life anxiety can be effectively treated with certain psychedelics and empathogens. It seems kind of cold to deny potential relief to war heroes, rape victims, addicts who want to reform, and terrified people who are about to die, doesn’t it? And think of the much more subtle and sophisticated medicines of the future! All of this stuff is eventually going to get discovered or created anyway. It’s really inevitable. Might as well stop trying to suppress research and start trying to figure out what it is that we want to be when we grow up.

We are the children of God, or so we are told. The child of a sheep grows up to be a sheep, though. The child of a human being grows up to be a human being. We must learn, individually and collectively, to be good and wise creators. We must use our snazzy new intelligence to fashion a new stable niche for ourselves and to fashion ourselves for it. We must play God as children play at being grown-ups, learning first by imitation and then by trial and error. Our intent is not to mock the stupendous mechanism of creation, but to study it and participate in its elaboration. Through what hands might we imagine that the Organizing Principle could complete its Great Work if not our own? We must strive to be worthy of this greatest honor. The moral of the Frankenstein story is true in that if we fail to create from the heart, then our creations will surely run amok and cause more trouble than they’re worth. We must have faith in ourselves, which is the hardest, and in each other, and in the future. Every generation that comes after us will inherit the power to destroy everything that everyone has ever worked for. They will also be heir to creative potential that we cannot yet begin to imagine. It’s natural to want to slow it all down. We’ve got to keep moving, though. We’re off balance right now, like someone who has taken a committed step, and now we have get the other foot down in front of us fast or we’ll fall on our collective face.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that we all need to be chemically adjusted or anything. I’m distrustful of panaceas; and when it comes right down to it, I have a certain perverse affection for the cowardly old world. I just think we ought to keep all of our options open, and learn to assess them without prejudice, shame or fear. There is nothing more natural than human curiosity. I, for one, can’t wait to see what we come up with next.